Portland author Peter Ames Carlin’s new biography reveals the darkness at the edge of Bruce Springsteen.

Portland author Peter Ames Carlin had stalked pop music
giants before. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys allowed Carlin into his
strange but creative world for a 2006 biography. And while his next
subject, Paul McCartney, never agreed to an interview, Carlin found new
stories to spin in the heavily trodden Beatles myth.

Three years ago,
Carlin turned his research talents to a performer whose work remains
influential and relevant after nearly five decades in the music
business: Bruce Springsteen.

While other aging
rockers have hit the tribal casino circuit or play to half-filled arenas
with moldering song catalogs, Springsteen at 63 continues to generate
music that inspires and challenges and agitates. His working-class-hero
narratives still resonate (no small feat given his nine-figure net
worth) and he’s emerged as an incisive political voice—witness President
Obama’s choice of Springsteen to headline his re-election campaign
events.

As with McCartney’s,
Springsteen’s life had already been well covered in bios and profiles.
And Springsteen had refused for the past 25 years to cooperate with
countless biographers who came seeking access.

But Carlin, 49,
worked his way through the protective layers around Springsteen, who
eventually nodded approval to members of the E Street Band and his
family to talk to Carlin. Last fall, Springsteen and Carlin sat down
over pizza, beer and tequila in one of Springsteen’s Freehold, N.J.,
haunts and began a series of interviews that stretched over nine months.

Carlin, a former senior writer for Peopleand TV critic at The Oregonian, didn’t allow that extraordinary access to soften his journalistic edge. His new book, Bruce (Touchstone, $28), looks at Springsteen as a musical and cultural
force, and as a complicated, often flawed character. Carlin’s reporting
breaks new ground in revealing secrets of Springsteen’s troubled
childhood that still echo in his work.

One
of the themes of this revelatory book is Springsteen’s battle with
depression—often not named or diagnosed as such until later in his
life—that led to personal and artistic crises, not to mention his manic
drive as a meticulous song master and difficult and sometimes cold boss
to his band.

In this excerpt from Bruce, the collision of Springsteen’s psyche and creativity reverberates in the recording of the landmark 1975 Born to Run album and its epic title song.

In 1973, Springsteen had released two critically acclaimed albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.
But the albums didn’t sell fast enough to satisfy his label, Columbia
Records, where there was much disagreement over whether Springsteen
would ever fulfill his promise as a rock star.

By the next year, Springsteen was under intense pressure to come up with a top-selling album—and a hit single.

Recently broken up with DianeLozito
[Springsteen’s girlfriend and the inspiration for his song “Rosalita”],
Bruce reclined on the bed in the small house he’d rented in the West
End region of Long Branch, New Jersey. Notebook folded open, guitar in
hand, he strummed idly, his line cast into the depths of consciousness,
waiting for an idea to present itself. A chord progression, a snatch of
melody, some kind of visual image, whatever. Then three words fell onto
his tongue: born to run.

The
title of a half-remembered B‑movie? Airbrushed words blazing across the
flank of a ’64 Chevy he spied on the Ocean-Kingsley circuit in Asbury?
Bruce had no idea. It didn’t really matter anyway. “I liked it because
it suggested a cinematic drama I thought would work with the music I was
hearing in my head,” he wrote in the late nineties. He came up with
chords, the verse reminiscent of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson-composed
love/lust/car drama “Don’t Worry Baby,” and tried to imagine where the
song would go from there. Like Wilson (working with lyricist Roger
Christian), Bruce’s highways led to bigger ideas and more urgent
feelings: “The cars only interested me as vehicles for writing my
songs.”

In Bruce’s
consciousness, the street racing scene defied the social and economic
strictures that kept the underprivileged, the young, and the outsiders
from becoming who they were meant to be. “Escape was the idea,” he said
to Eve Zibart in 1978. It connected everything, from Chuck Berry’s
“School Days” to Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues
Again.” “The song is a release. It’s an expression of the humdrum, the
daily existence that you break out of.”

Bruce dismissed his alter egos and stood alone at the center of the
screen, climbing into the car and feeling the wheel vibrating in his own
palms.

In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream / At

night we stop and tremble in heat / With murder in our dreams...

From there it all came pouring out: the surfers shivering
in the breakers; the cars rumbling down Highway 9 to identical towns
farther down the Shore, the metal-flake hot rods turning slow circles on
the Asbury Park circuit. “Like animals pacing in a black, dark cage,
senses on overload,” he wrote. “They’re gonna end this night in a
senseless fight / and then watch the world explode.”

Everyone, everywhere, all souped up with no place to go.

It’s a death trap! A suicide rap! We gotta get out while we’re young / ’Cause tramps like us, baby...

Then it all comes back to the three words, and the
governing realization that spurred the composition of the song and
everything that would follow.

...we were born to run.

It would take him months to get the words
just so and even longer to capture the gleaming sound already playing
in his ears. But he’d found the heart of the song, the chords and melody
ringing so true that he could already sense that he’d tapped into
something powerful. “This was the turning point,” he wrote later. “It
proved to be the key to my songwriting for the rest of the record.”

AT THE JERSEY SHORE: Bruce Springsteen and his sister, Ginny, circa 1955.

Courtesy of Springsteen Family Archives

When they had a finished mixof
the “Born to Run” single in the early summer of 1974, Mike Appel
[Springsteen’s then-manager] invited Columbia president Bruce Lundvall
to the studio. Lundvall sat quietly as the tape rolled. When the final
notes faded, he looked over at Bruce. “You just made a hit record,” he
said. To Lundvall’s surprise, Bruce shrugged it off. “He didn’t believe
me,” the executive says. “But I told him it was a smash and sent him
back to make the rest of the album.”

You
might think that sweeping praise from the top executive in his record
company would have eased the make-or-break burden that Bruce lugged with
him. You would be wrong. Because whenever he listened to the first two
albums, all Bruce could hear were the things he wished he’d done
differently. The overstuffed lyrics, the stilted sound, the distance
between what he needed to say and what came out of the speakers. “He
wanted to write as directly as the great songwriters did,” Appel says.
“We kept talking about it: balance, balance, balance.”

Which sounded a lot
easier than it turned out to be for Bruce, who spent hours laboring over
every syllable in his notebook, along with every note that came from
every instrument and every nuance of every sonic texture. Everything, he
decreed, had to serve a distinct purpose. “He kept coming back with
different sets of lyrics,” Appel says. “Something like five versions of
‘Born to Run’ alone. ‘How’s this one, Mike? What do you think of these
ones now?’ Finally, I told him to go and pick out his favorites
himself—I was done.”

“You think there’s a right way, which is a fallacy,” Bruce said to Rolling Stone’s
Joe Levy three decades later. But, he continued, if you’re young and
screwed up enough, losing yourself in work can be far more appealing
than being aware of, and directly confronting, your own dysfunction. “It
was the only way I knew how to work,” Bruce said. “It was fun, but it
was exhausting. I think intentionally exhausting.”

BEFORE BORN TO RUN: Springsteen with girlfriend Diane Lozito, the inspiration for “Rosalita,” circa 1973.

Courtesy of Diane Lozito Collection

When videographer Barry Rebo drove
up to the 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt to shoot the recording sessions
in January 1975, he found Bruce, Appel, and the band looking as sad and
translucent as ghosts. A year since they started work on the “Born to
Run” single and first attempted a skeletal version of “Jungleland,” they
had a total of one song finished. With trained professionals Roy Bittan
[on piano] and [drummer] Max Weinberg on board, Rebo expected the
recording to flow more smoothly than before. Instead the overnight
session became an endless series of false starts, faltering equipment,
off-kilter takes, and increasingly dispirited attempts to rally for
another try.

Anyone
glancing up to the studio window could spy a piano tuner working
frantically to adjust the studio’s perpetually out-of-key piano. When
the tuner warned Appel that the instrument had structural problems and
would never hold a tuning for more than thirty minutes or so, Appel
nodded but shook off the man’s $10-an-hour offer to be present and ready
to work all night. They simply did not have the cash to pay for it.

Back
in the studio at eleven, Bruce, the band, and their production team
knuckled down for another run at “Jungleland.” With Bruce clad in a
T‑shirt and bomber jacket in the vocal booth, he counted off the song
and then closed his eyes to sing the first verse. They got only halfway
into the second verse before Appel called a halt through the control
room intercom, explaining that the instruments had fallen out of sync in
one verse.When they got
through an entire take, Appel punched the button on his microphone. “All
right, that was a great take as far as we’re concerned!” he crowed.
“What do you wanna do, Bruce?” Springsteen shrugged. “Do another one,”
he said. “Do it this time with—”

Appel, back on his microphone, didn’t seem to hear. “What a great take. Isn’t it great to have one under the belt?”

Another try. Bruce in his booth, eyes shut, dancing and swinging his arms as he sang, swept up in the music. Then the skronk
of the control room intercom button. “Bad take!” engineer Louis Lahav
barked. “Why?” Appel asked. “Rushed.” Bruce sighed, and they started
again, getting all the way through to the end. Everyone agreed that one
came out near perfectly—except for Bruce, whose forehead puckered as he
contemplated a four-beat piano transition from the first section into
the sax solo in the middle. “You think them chords are making it in the
middle?” he asked. As Appel contemplated the need to revise the design
of the song yet again, Bruce led the band in a sloppy but cheerful
attempt at Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.”

More tries at
“Jungleland,” more breakdowns. Between takes, Bittan sat at the piano
looking confused, searching for new chord inversions that might sound
better in the song. But why did these ones suddenly sound so wrong? In
the control room, a gloomy Appel muttered the obvious: “It’s out of tune
again. Should we tell Bruce?”

“What I saw in these sessions is that he could not get any momentum going because of these interruptions,” says Jon Landau, a Rolling Stone
music critic who had dabbled in record production. Speaking to Roy
Bittan, also no stranger to recording sessions, Landau discovered they
shared the same frustrations. “I remember [Bittan] saying, ‘What the
fuck are we doing in this place?’”

Something needed to
change. And so Bruce picked up the telephone and made another call to
the man whose words had already changed his career for the better. Bruce
had seen his new album’s future, and its name was Jon Landau.

Landau’s first contribution to Born to Run had been on
his mind ever since he took a close listen to Springsteen’s first two
records: get the musician and his band the hell out of the perpetually
flawed 914 Sound Studios. “Do something about this!” Landau
beseeched his friend. “You’re a world-class artist, you deserve a
world-class studio!” When the recording sessions picked up again in
March, the operation moved to the Record Plant in midtown Manhattan. And
although Appel still wasn’t convinced they needed another expert in the
studio, Bruce’s word still reigned, and Appel slid over to make room
for the album’s third coproducer: Jon Landau.

The resulting tension
appealed to Bruce, who had learned the benefit of being the pivot point
between two opposing forces as a boy living with two sets of parents at
his grandparents’ house. So while Landau and Appel struggled for his
ear, Bruce could take rich advantage of his partners’ strengths, turning
to Landau for structural and narrative advice, while relying on Appel’s
mastery of detail to make certain every note sounded exactly right.

Appel also recalls
fighting to convince Bruce and Landau to back down in their struggle to
include “Linda Let Me Be the One” and “Lonely Night in the Park” on the
finished album. “I said, ‘You really think those shitty songs can stand
next to ‘Backstreets’ and ‘Thunder Road’? That’s what you think? Fuck
that!’” Appel proved just as stubborn, and correct, when he fought to
keep “The Heist,” subsequently renamed “Meeting Across the River,” on
the finished album. Musically, the song’s piano, standup bass, and muted
trumpet seem closer to the romantic street poetry on “New York City
Serenade” and “Incident on 57th Street” than to the chrome-detailed rock
’n’ roll they were crafting for the new record. But this time the music
and lyrics had been honed to the barest essentials, all crafted to
underscore one man’s last, desperate shot at redemption.

And like a novel, the
chapters—or songs, in this case—had to dovetail, contrast, and
ultimately enhance one another. So while “Thunder Road” might sound
perfect in its full-band arrangement, it might better suit the album in a
completely different context, with a completely different sound and
message. At one point, Bruce tore the fully-wrought song down to its
foundation, rebuilding it as a brooding acoustic guitar piece with a
completely new melody, stripped-down chord changes, some different
words, and the climactic “I’m pullin’ out of here to win” exhaled like a
sigh of defeat.

The
process felt slow, grim, and tortuous. When bassist Garry Tallent’s wife
visited a session one evening, she wound up spending eight hours
watching Bruce try to coach the band through an eight-bar instrumental
passage in one song. “When she left, she said, ‘Don’t ever take
me to a recording session again!’” Tallent remembers. The guys in the
band, of course, had no options. “All we could do was hold on. Smoke a
lot of pot and try to stay calm,” said Clarence Clemons, the E Street
Band’s saxophone player, who spent sixteen hours playing and replaying
every note of his “Jungleland” solo in order to satisfy Bruce’s
bat-eared attention to sonic detail.

When the sessions
finally ended, Bruce described the era as an endless loop of unplayable
parts, unfixable mistakes, and unmixable recordings. The experience, he
told the New York Times’ John Rockwell in late 1975, was “like a
total wipeout. It was a devastating thing, the hardest thing I ever
did.” The fact that Bruce actively resisted help from more experienced
hands, particularly when it came to mixing final versions of the songs,
only made it more difficult. For all that he required absolute control
over every aspect of the album, holding that much authority also
multiplied his psychic burden. The closer he clutched the thing to his
chest, the less of it he could see, or comprehend.

Finally escaping the Record Plantstruck the entire band as an enormous relief, but the emotional respite didn’t last long.

[In July 1975] Appel
showed up at the band’s hotel in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, with an acetate
pressing of the master recording of Born to Run. Appel placed
the disc on the inexpensive portable record player Bruce took on the
road and let it spin. When the last notes of “Jungleland” faded out, the
band whooped, applauded, and reached out to slap hands. Stephen Appel,
still serving as road manager, noticed that his big brother’s eyes
glistened with tears. Relief seemed to blow in through the open window,
except for Bruce, who sat with his face clenched, staring into the
carpet. “I dunno,” he said darkly. “I’d do things differently.” Beard
abristle, he jumped to his feet, snatched the acetate from the
turntable, and stalked out to the hotel courtyard, where he flung it
into the swimming pool.

What was wrong? How about everything.
The sax parts sounded like a bad Bruce Springsteen imitation. (That’s
when Clemons stalked out of the room.) The piano drowned out the
guitars. The mix had the clarity of a shit storm. All this time, all
that work, and this was the best they could do? And in conclusion: “Fuck!”
Bruce swan dived into the gloom. Did he understand that an acetate
never sounds as good as the finished album? Did he take a moment to
consider that the portable stereo he’d just been listening to, with its
plastic speakers, tin tonearm, and Easy-Bake Oven design, might not even
be capable of reproducing the dense, intricate recordings they had
made? Apparently not.

Bruce was too busy
declaring the entire project a waste of time. A cruel satire of rock ’n’
roll. Overheated dogshit. Appel dialed Landau, told him what had
happened, and handed the phone to Bruce. “I was saying, look, you can’t
and will not be able to put every thought, every idea, and every
creative impulse onto one record.” Landau insisted Bruce should take all
of his new ideas and put them in his notebook for the next record.
“There is going to be a next record, believe me,” he swore.

Bruce remained
unconvinced. He hung up the phone and looked over at Appel, now
reclining in a chair and shaking his head. “Fuck it,” Appel said. “Let’s
scrap the whole thing. I mean, obviously. Just fuck it.” They
could let the label release the “Born to Run” single as a stopgap, and
then rerecord the songs live in the studio without any overdubs or Phil
Spectorian witchcraft?

“I was being crazier than him, see?” Appel says. “Now he
had to be the voice of reason.” Bruce, then-girlfriend Karen Darvin,
and the two Appels all piled into Mike’s car and headed for the turnpike
back to the city. They were maybe halfway home when Bruce started to
laugh. Quietly at first, then uproariously. “He thought it was hilarious
that Mike was so crazy,” Stephen Appel says. “Suddenly he was in a
great place. Both Mike and Jon had said exactly the right things to him.
I never saw Bruce happier than on that car ride.” By the time they got
back to New York, Bruce shrugged off the last six torturous hours with a
wave of the hand. “Then again,” he said, “let’s just let it ride.”

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